Books Briefly
BOOKS BRIEFLY Affirmation WARTIME WRITINGS 1930-1944 by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 237 pp. $12.95. Nearly fifty years ago, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's books, Wind, Sand...
...Nearly fifty years ago, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's books, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras, and The Little Prince, were best sellers in both France and the United States...
...8.95 paperback...
...160 pp...
...The survivor whose tale is told in Maus is Spiegel-man's father, and the narrative takes him from the routines of work and domestic life in prewar Poland to the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp...
...The pioneer aviator never returned from his ninth reconnaissance mission over occupied France in 1944...
...It turns out, though, that Art Spiegelman's little book is as compelling an account as you are likely to read this year about the experience of European Jewry under the Third Reich...
...French to his core, he agonized over the dissension among his compatriots over the Vichy and de Gaulle groups...
...Even so, it remains a passionate statement for peace and a scathing indictment of totalitarianism...
...If I'm shot down," he wrote, "I won't regret anything...
...This collection of his wartime writings, with an appreciative introduction by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, lacks the polish of his carefully crafted books...
...A comic book about the Holocaust...
...Spiegelman's remarkable achievement is that this fable in comicbook form is totally credible and deeply moving...
...A moving affirmation of the individual...
...A future anthill appalls me, and I hate the robot virtues...
...A second volume, now in the works, will complete the journey...
...Maus has already won awards, and it deserves many more...
...Trapped MAUS: A SURVIVOR'S TALE by Art Spiegelman Pantheon...
...He had an ominous foreboding about a postwar world of technology without spiritual values...
...One's first reaction is that this must be a monstrous travesty...
...An animal fable in which Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs...
Vol. 50 • November 1986 • No. 11
